Royal

by Danielle Steel

  “If this was a single baby, I’d have said it was going to be very fast. But it never is with twins. We can give you something for the pain, Lucy, but we need your help. I can’t give you much. We can put you out when it’s over, but we’re going to need your cooperation, so you’ll need to be awake and alert, especially for the second twin. We don’t want too much time between the two deliveries. How long did your last labor take?” he asked, and Lucy looked stunned for a minute and didn’t know what to say.

  “I can’t remember,” she said vaguely, and the doctor looked surprised.

  “It can’t have been too bad then.” He smiled at her. “Most women remember every minute of it. It won’t be long now for the first one. I can feel the baby’s head.” He examined her again, and that time she screamed, and the doctor asked Jonathan if he wanted to leave the room and he shook his head and didn’t move.

  “I’ve helped a lot of mares give birth,” he said calmly, and although he said it was unusual, the doctor let him stay. He was worried at how severely Lucy was reacting, and thought she’d need all the support she could get. Jonathan was quiet and calm, and didn’t seem inclined to panic. He sat next to Lucy, while she cried, until they took her to the delivery room, and Jonathan stayed near her head. The doctor was right. Lucy sounded like she was dying, but the doctor had the first twin in her arms after half an hour of strenuous pushing. It was a boy. Then the contractions stopped for a few minutes, before they started again with a vengeance, and Lucy begged them both to do something to stop it. They put an oxygen mask on her while she pushed. The second twin took an hour and was much more difficult. He was bigger and gave a powerful cry when he was born. Jonathan held him for a few minutes, while the doctor tended to Lucy, and then he cut the cord. They gave her a shot for the pain the moment both babies were out, and she was groggy as she looked at Jonathan and seemed dazed. But everything had gone well. The first twin had weighed nine pounds, and the second twin weighed just over ten. She had been carrying nineteen pounds of baby, and felt as though she had given birth to twin elephants. They were strapping, healthy baby boys, no matter what they had cost their mother.

  “I’m not going to die like Charlotte, am I?” she asked Jonathan with glazed eyes.

  “You’re not going to die, my love. I’m so proud of you. We have two big beautiful boys. Who’s Charlotte?” he asked her then, and she shook her head and cried, as the doctor put another mask over her face and gave her a whiff of chloroform to put her out.

  “She’ll sleep for a while now,” he said softly to Jonathan. “She did very well. Twins aren’t easy. And you have two great big boys there. I’m surprised she went full term.” They were fraternal twins, not identical, but they looked very similar to their father. “You can go to the nursery now if you like. We’re going to clean her up, and take her to a room. The nurse will call you when she’s awake.” Jonathan thanked him, and followed his sons to the nursery. It was the happiest day of his life, and he couldn’t wait to show the twins to their big sister.

  He took turns holding them in the nursery, and he was sitting at Lucy’s bedside when she woke up. She looked as though she had been through an ordeal, and she had. He kissed her as soon as she was awake.

  “I thought I was going to die,” she said in a hoarse voice.

  “I wouldn’t have let you. We all need you too much.” He had never thought there was a risk of that, and the doctor seemed calm throughout. “Who’s Charlotte?” he asked her again, now that she was awake.

  “Why?” She looked panicked at the mention of her name.

  “You asked if you were going to die like her.”

  “She’s a woman I used to know, who died a few hours after she gave birth.”

  “That’s not going to happen to you,” he said firmly, as a nurse came in and asked her if she was going to nurse her babies. Lucy said she was, although it seemed daunting with twins, but she wanted to try. Now that she had survived it, she wanted to enjoy her baby boys to the fullest. She had been terrified for nine months.

  “Did you nurse last time?” the nurse asked her, since she was listed as a second-time mother on her chart.

  “No, I didn’t,” Lucy said, and seemed awkward about it. “But I want to this time.” The nurse told her how to do it with twins. It sounded complicated and she was going to need all the help she could get when she went home. But her mother-in-law had promised to be there, and Jonathan would help her at night.

  She spent five days in the hospital, and the babies were nursing well by the time she went home. Annie couldn’t wait to meet them. They let her hold them, sitting down, one at a time. Jonathan was a natural father, and managed to make Annie still feel special too. He even cooked her favorite dinner of shepherd’s pie, and ice cream. Overnight they had become a family, with a mother, father, and three children. Their cottage felt as though it was bursting at the seams, and Jonathan enjoyed it thoroughly. Lucy was overwhelmed, but Annie did little chores for her, and her mother-in-law was a huge help. Three children were a lot for Lucy to cope with, and it was even harder than she expected. In comparison, Annie had been so easy. Twins were a lot to deal with. One was always hungry and crying, and sometimes both of them.

  A month after their birth, Lucy was relieved to go back to work. All of her colleagues had come to see the twins while she was at home, and Mrs. Markham had sent them lovely gifts, in duplicate, with little matching outfits. But it was nice getting out of the house and going back to her job. She stopped nursing when she did, and she went home at lunchtime to help her mother-in-law give the twins their bottles. After the terror of the last nine months, thinking she would die like Charlotte, she hadn’t, and Lucy felt complete with the family she and Jonathan had. She was emphatic about not wanting more children. Annie remained special to both of them, and the twins were like whirling dervishes going in opposite directions as soon as they could walk, which one of them did at nine months, the other at ten. Annie was the perfect big sister, patient, loving, responsible. She told her parents she would teach her brothers to ride one day, and she admitted to her grandmother that as much as she loved her baby brothers, she still liked horses better.

  “She certainly doesn’t take after you,” Jonathan’s mother commented to her daughter-in-law, laughing. Blake, one of the twins, was the image of Lucy and looked just like her, and Rupert was identical to his father. And Annie looked nothing like any of them. She was fine-featured, tiny, and seemed to float when she walked. She had a regal air and grace even at six. And looking at Lucy’s large frame, and plain facial features, at times it was hard to imagine she was Annie’s mother. They looked and acted nothing alike.

  “The fairies must have left you on your mom’s doorstep,” her grandmother teased her. Annie loved that idea, and Lucy didn’t comment when she heard her say it.

  Chapter 7

  When Blake and Rupert were eighteen months old, they were running everywhere, and it took Lucy, Jonathan, Annie, and their grandmother to control them. They knocked things down, pushed over lamps, climbed up on tables. They got into mischief everywhere, and the only time Lucy and Jonathan had peace was when the boys were asleep at night in the crib they shared. They slept in one crib, and cried when they didn’t, so whichever of them woke first invariably woke the other, and then the fun began.

  Jonathan and Lucy had no time for long, lazy mornings, or romantic nights. The twins were like a tornado that hit the cottage every day, as soon as they got up. Jonathan thoroughly enjoyed them, and Lucy loved them too, although Jonathan had more patience with them. They wore Lucy out and she told Jonathan that the twins and Annie were enough for her. He would have liked one more, but she said he’d need another wife to pursue that plan, and he graciously conceded, and settled for three children. In his opinion, Annie and the twins were the best things that had ever happened to him. He was a happy man. He loved his wife, his family, and his job. He loved wor
king on the estate where he’d grown up, even with new owners. He had never hungered for distant shores or great adventures. He had exactly the life he wanted and was content.

  Three months after the twins turned two, he gave Lucy a Christmas present that she said was the best one she’d ever had. He bought her a television, one of the big fancy floor models with the widest screen they made. It came in a piece of furniture, and was the pride of their living room, even though the images were black and white. They hadn’t invented color TV yet, but he promised to get Lucy one whenever they came out with it.

  Lucy had favorite programs she turned on every night when she came home from work. Jonathan watched sports matches on the weekends, and there were even suitable shows for Annie early in the evening. She was eight years old. Whenever there was a horse show on TV, she ran to see it. It really was the best gift he’d given the entire family. The boys were still too young for it, but soon they’d be able to watch it too. The gift was particularly meaningful that year because King Frederick had died in February, and his oldest daughter, Alexandra, had become queen. Her coronation had been postponed for sixteen months, for assorted political reasons the public wasn’t privy to, and her coronation had been set for June of the coming year. For the first time in history, it was going to be televised, so millions of people could watch it in their homes around the world. Lucy was going to be one of them. She had been saying for months that she was going to take the day off from work to watch it, wherever she had to go to find a television, and now, thanks to her generous husband, she had her own.

  It had always amused Jonathan that Lucy was obsessed with royalty, and in particular the British monarchy. She subscribed to The Queen magazine, and any publication that wrote about the royals. She read every news report about them. The coronation of Queen Alexandra was going to be the high point of her obsession with the monarchy. Jonathan’s well-timed Christmas gift would allow Lucy to watch Queen Alexandra’s coronation at home in June.

  The new queen was a young woman, the youngest to ascend the throne since Queen Victoria had become queen at eighteen in the nineteenth century. Queen Alexandra was twenty-nine years old when she became queen, had been married for five years, and was expecting her third child when her father died. She gave birth to her third son the week after her father’s funeral. So the succession was now assured with an “heir and two spares” as the British liked to say. Queen Alexandra’s three sons were in line for the throne after her, with her oldest son first in line. Fourth in line to the throne was Queen Alexandra’s younger sister Victoria, a year younger than the new monarch, and unmarried. She had always been somewhat wild in her romantic choices, and had the personality to go with her flaming red hair. Alexandra and Victoria had had a younger sister who had died tragically at seventeen during the war, in 1944. She’d died of complications from pneumonia. Queen Alexandra’s mother, Anne, was now the Queen Mother since the death of her husband, King Frederick.

  Jonathan had always been ignorant about the royals, and somewhat indifferent to them, until Lucy filled him in on all the details. She seemed to know everything about them and read up on them constantly. Queen Alexandra had a German husband who was prince consort, His Royal Highness Prince Edward, just as her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria had had in her husband, Prince Albert. Although allegedly very much in love with their husbands, neither queen had ever requested the government to make her husband king, and both men had remained with the more limited status of prince consort. But as both were German-born, it was unlikely that the cabinet would have approved of their being made king. So both queens reigned alone. Queen Alexandra’s coronation in June promised to be a dazzling affair, complete with the legendary historic golden coach in which she would travel to the ceremony, while wearing an ermine robe over her coronation gown, and her heavily jeweled crown was said to weigh forty pounds.

  Monarchs from all over Europe and dignitaries from every country would be in Westminster Abbey, by highly coveted invitation, to see her crowned. And now Lucy could see every last detail of the ceremony too, sitting on her couch in her own home.

  Jonathan had often teased her about her fascination with the monarchy, and now he had made her dreams come true. Her new television was her proudest possession.

  Annie didn’t share her mother’s obsession with the royals, and at eight years of age, she was still much more interested in horses than Royal Highnesses. She would turn nine in a few weeks before the coronation and Lucy correctly suspected that her daughter wouldn’t bother watching it, although she was slightly intrigued by the horses that would be part of the ceremony, and those that would be drawing the golden coach. Other than the horses, Annie had no interest in it.

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  In June, the coronation, which Lucy watched on TV for several hours, from beginning to end, lived up to all her expectations. It was the high point of her passion for all things royal.

  It was not lost on Lucy, although no one else in the world knew it, that Annie was now fifth in line to the throne, though it was unlikely the succession would ever get that far down the list. The young woman who had just been crowned Queen of England was Annie’s aunt, and the late Charlotte’s oldest sister. The young queen’s three sons were Annie’s cousins, and the Queen Mother, Anne, was her grandmother. They were Annie’s family by blood and birth, although she didn’t know it, and they had no knowledge of her existence. But it was a thrill for Lucy to know it, as she watched them on her television screen. The child she considered her daughter, and always would, was part of the royal family because of her mother, the late Royal Highness Princess Charlotte, who had died hours after giving birth to Annie. And the only person who knew was Lucy herself. The proof of it was still locked in the leather box that had belonged to Charlotte, and Lucy had taken from her room before she left Yorkshire with Annie when she was a year old. All the pomp and ceremony in Westminster Abbey, the golden coach, the fabulous horses and gowns and glittering crowns were all part of Annie’s heritage. She was a Royal Highness too, just as her mother had been. Lucy never allowed herself to think that she had deprived her of it. She had given her love instead. The thought that the royal family might have loved her too, although they knew nothing of her existence, never occurred to her. She had never regretted her decision, or doubted her judgment, even once.

  Annie headed for the stables to find her father while her mother was still watching the coronation on television.

  “What’s your mom up to?” he asked Annie when she climbed under the fence. She was still noticeably small for her age, having just turned nine, and looked more like a six-year-old, but she rode like a man, her father liked to say. Her riding skill was as much part of her birthright as the ceremony in Westminster Abbey, but no one except Lucy knew that either. Lucy had kept her dark secrets for nine years now, ever since she had left Yorkshire and Ainsleigh Hall with Annie as a baby, and had pretended that she was her own, and had erased all trace of Annie’s existence so the royal family would never find her.

  “She’s watching that thing on TV,” Annie said with a roll of the eyes. “The coach was pretty cool though. And the horses are gorgeous.”

  “I think your mom is more interested in the crowns and gowns.” They both laughed, but Jonathan was happy for Lucy that she was enjoying it, and was sure she would talk about it for days. Televising the coronation had been a stroke of brilliance and had brought it into the common man’s living room. Women like Lucy could have a front row seat, on the couch, with a cup of tea.

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  —

  By the time Annie was twelve, she had won ribbons at every horse show Jonathan entered her in. She was much more interested in speed than in the precise maneuvers of dressage or jumping competitions.

  And at thirteen, she and her father had several serious arguments, and he had banned her from the stables for a week, after she snuck out with John Mar
kham’s wildest new stallion, not even fully broken yet, and rode him hell for leather across the fields. Her father noticed the horse was missing a short time after she’d taken him, and he’d gone looking for her. What he’d seen was heart-stopping. He was sure she’d broken some kind of speed record, but she could easily have broken her neck or lamed a horse who over his lifetime might prove to be worth millions. He had brought her back looking chastened and mollified. She begged every day to be allowed to come back to the stables, and he had stuck to the week restriction to teach her a lesson. To his knowledge, she never did it again, but he wasn’t entirely sure. Annie was smart as a whip, and in love with horses, the faster the better.

  At fifteen, to complicate matters further, she saw a horse race on television. Instead of aspiring to be a horse trainer or a stable hand, she announced that she wanted to be a jockey when she grew up. The televised horse race had convinced her. She was the right size, but the wrong gender, her stepfather informed her. Women were not allowed to be jockeys. Horseracing was a man’s sport, and he told her it was much too dangerous. It was 1959, and the idea of women jockeys was unheard of. Jonathan told her that females were allowed to compete in some amateur events, but in his opinion they would never be allowed to race in professional ones.

  “I want you to grow up to be a lady,” her father told her, “not an amateur jockey at sleazy, second-rate events. I love what I do, but you have to aspire to more than just being master of the stables, a job no one is ever going to give a woman anyway. Your mother wants more for you too.” Lucy had been a housemaid, and more recently housekeeper for the Markhams, but she had greater ambitions for the daughter she always referred to as her “princess.” Oddly enough, Annie looked like one when she wasn’t riding at full speed. She had a natural grace and elegance and a strangely aristocratic look to her in spite of her small size.